Top 50 Sebastian Thrun Quotes
#1. When I look at founders and CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Brian Chesky at Airbnb and Sebastian Thrun at Udacity, these are companies that are creating extraordinary social good and extraordinary economic and educational empowerment, all within with context of a for-profit model.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#2. It's important to celebrate your failures as much as your successes. If you celebrate your failures really well, and if you get to the motto and say, 'Wow, I failed, I tried, I was wrong, I learned something,' then you realize you have no fear, and when your fear goes away, you can move the world.
Sebastian Thrun
#3. We need to make education so much fun that students can't help but learn.
Sebastian Thrun
#4. I feel every technology can be abused, but fundamentally we put new technologies into the service of humanity.
Sebastian Thrun
#5. It's sad that we never get trained to leave assumptions behind.
Sebastian Thrun
#6. You can't change the world without a certain amount of healthy willingness to break the rules.
Sebastian Thrun
#7. That's what Google taught me. Aim higher. Udacity is my playground - to radically experiment and find out. I've seen the light.
Sebastian Thrun
#8. I have a strong disrespect for authority and for rules. Including gravity. Gravity sucks.
Sebastian Thrun
#9. We humans usually feel that we are the best at everything we do, that we can safely drive ourselves. But tens of thousands of people die every year. We need to be open to having technology assist us, to find ways in which technology makes us safer.
Sebastian Thrun
#10. In 50 years, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them.
Sebastian Thrun
#11. The Inventor Of Google Glass Says It Could Outsource Our Brains
Sebastian Thrun
#12. Online education that leaves almost everybody behind except for highly motivated students, to me, can't be a viable path to education.
Sebastian Thrun
#13. I don't think we will put higher-ed out of business. I think we'll evolve it. More access, higher quality, lower costs, more global reach.
Sebastian Thrun
#14. If you focus on the single question of who knows best what students need in the workforce, it's the people already in the workforce. Why not give industry a voice?
Sebastian Thrun
#15. If you look at the ability of a self-driving car to stay in the lane and not to speed and keep a good distance to the car in front of you, it actually does better than me.
Sebastian Thrun
#16. My process is learn, decide, and do. I've never seen a problem that couldn't be solved this way.
Sebastian Thrun
#17. Giving education away for free is a really good idea, but it can't be the future of education. There has to be a business model around it that actually works.
Sebastian Thrun
#18. Google X is here to do moonshot-type projects. Not just shooting to the moon, but bringing the moon back to Earth.
Sebastian Thrun
#19. Most rules that you think are written in stone are just societal. You can change the game and really reach for the stars and make the world a better place.
Sebastian Thrun
#20. I take all day to climb mountains and then spend about 10 minutes at the top admiring the view.
Sebastian Thrun
#21. In most parts of the world, starting a company that goes bust is dubbed a 'failure.' In Silicon Valley, we call this 'gaining experience.' We are willing to take the risks that are inherent for innovation.
Sebastian Thrun
#22. At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment.
Sebastian Thrun
#23. Access to high-quality education is way too limited. The United States has the world's most admirable higher education system, and yet it is very restrictive. It's so hard to get into. I never got into it as a student.
Sebastian Thrun
#24. I'd really love to see a business model for higher education going forward that is actually affordable, that uses modern technology to reach scale and quality and that really reimburses the services rendered in a way that's meaningful to everybody.
Sebastian Thrun
#25. You are going to fail, and failing, for me, is as joyful as succeeding. Failing means that there is something to learn, and we can improve and do it better next time.
Sebastian Thrun
#26. I care about education for everyone, not just the elite.
Sebastian Thrun
#27. I've developed my passion for cars that drive themselves from being stuck in traffic for many, many, many hours of my life. I don't know what it adds up to, but I feel like I've lost a year or two just in traffic. That's big to me. That's a lot of time, a lot of money that I just lose on the road.
Sebastian Thrun
#28. Self-driving cars will enable car-sharing even in spread-out suburbs. A car will come to you just when you need it. And when you are done with it, the car will just drive away, so you won't even have to look for parking.
Sebastian Thrun
#29. As a child, I spent a lot of time with things like Lego, building trains, cars, complex structures, and I really liked that.
Sebastian Thrun
#30. It's a no-brainer for me that at some point our cars will have the ability to drive themselves.
Sebastian Thrun
#31. Question every assumption and go towards the problem, like the way they flew to the moon. We should have more moon shots and flights to the moon in areas of societal importance.
Sebastian Thrun
#32. Every time I act on a fear, I feel disappointed in myself. I have a lot of fear. If I can quit all fear in my life and all guilt, then I tend to be much, much more living up to my standards. I've never seen a person fail if they didn't fear failure.
Sebastian Thrun
#34. I have been spending the better part of my professional life trying to create self-driving cars. At Google, I am working with a world-class team of engineers to turn science fiction into reality.
Sebastian Thrun
#35. If we could do away with traffic accidents, that'd be wonderful. There'd be more than a million people saved every year on this planet.
Sebastian Thrun
#36. I find it amazingly easy to take something, if you really believe in it, and turn it to reality.
Sebastian Thrun
#37. Few ideas work on the first try. Iteration is key to innovation.
Sebastian Thrun
#38. I really believe that we have to work hard to make online education better and better, and eventually it's going to be really great. But like most of these things, it takes time to improve, to understand and to make things really good.
Sebastian Thrun
#39. In my son's kindergarten, they're telling us how to get him into Stanford. By their advice, I'm doing everything wrong, because I'm trying to make him happy rather than putting him through as many piano lessons as possible.
Sebastian Thrun
#40. Honestly, the average American spends about 52 minutes a day in commute traffic. And as much as I love driving my car and many people like driving their car, commuting has never been fun for me.
Sebastian Thrun
#41. I'm really looking forward to a time when generations after us look back and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars.
Sebastian Thrun
#42. I am particularly surprised that certain outlets look at pass rates irrespective of student population. As if inner city high school kids are to fare as well as college students.
Sebastian Thrun
#43. I ultimately got into robotics because for me, it was the best way to study intelligence.
Sebastian Thrun
#44. I always felt that if countries knew each other better, there would be less war. Often, conflict goes with demonizing other countries and cultures.
Sebastian Thrun
#45. Nobody phrases it this way, but I think that artificial intelligence is almost a humanities discipline. It's really an attempt to understand human intelligence and human cognition.
Sebastian Thrun
#46. You have to understand that teaching online is different, just like movies are different from the stage and TV is different from radio.
Sebastian Thrun
#47. Even as a college professor at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, I saw myself as an entrepreneur, and I went out, took risks, and tried to invent new things, such as participating in the DARPA Grand Challenge and working on self-driving cars.
Sebastian Thrun
#48. I always love to be careful with my expectations so that life has pleasant surprises for me.
Sebastian Thrun
#49. Technology is synonymous for connection with other people.
Sebastian Thrun
#50. I believe e-courses will eventually change people's attitude toward learning. Education will play an increasingly dominant role in people's lives. For people of all ages and all geographies.
Sebastian Thrun
